Kimetsu no Yaiba, or Blade of Demon Destruction, by Koyoharu Gotouge, begins when Tanjiro, a kid who went down the mountains to sell some charcoal and make enough money to support his family, returned to his home to find his family killed, with only his sister, Nezuko, barely clinging to her life.
If that’s not some way to start a samurai shounen series, then I got nothing else.
Though it felt cliche, having Tanjiro see his family’s corpses strewn along the ground was set up in a manner that was unexpected. From the first page it’s clear something bad happened, but to expect this kid’s entire family to be killed off is some way to start a series. Now it makes you wonder just how far the manga will go in telling the story of how a brother can survive this world with his sister.
…The sister happens to be infected with demon blood.
I think this is one twist Gotouge could be going for from most of the standard WSJ titles. There aren’t too many shounen series that I can think of that feature a brother/sister combination (for those that do know, feel free to let me know) as the main leads. It’s actually neat in that regard, though how much that combination will matter depends on what happens next. After Tanjiro manages to get some sort of emotion from Nezuko, a demon slayer appears and nearly kills her. All it took was Nezuko trying to save her brother from being attacked that not only saved them from getting killed, but they might have found some sort of solution because of the demon slayer’s empathy. Now they have to go meet someone to change their current predicament.
Despite some moments where they talk a lot, Kimetsu no Yaiba was pretty eventful. I wonder though — where will it go from here? My first guess, in order for this series to be extended, is that there’s temporary stop gaps to prevent Nezuko from going berserk and wanting to eat humans, but they have to find the demon who killed their family. I guess the second thing is it could be a revenge thing, but I doubt it. I’m currently not sure what else can happen, unless they turn themselves into a demon-slaying group so they can prevent what happened to them to happen to others. The possibilities seem limited, but there’s gotta be some direction they can go after this.
Well, I’m at least fascinated to see what’ll happen next. I hope it’s in a good direction.